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abraxas, to memes in The system is broken

One can get place renting for $2k, but can’t get approved for that mortgage amount even with tons of history showing it’s paid

I think the issue there is that there’s more risk to mortgage companies than “tons of history showing it’s paid”. There’s a reason they use complicated equations instead of interviews to make decisions related to risk. Questions that don’t directly relate to someone being unable to pay mortgage:

  1. Will they take action that reduces the property value enough to put them underwater
  2. If they choose to walk away for some reason, what percent of our investment do we get back?

And with the rest of the equation, home ownership is higher risk than renting because a tenant isn’t responsible for damage and repairs. If, for example, peeling asbestos gets discovered and you have to move out to fix it to the tune of $10,000 or more, will that homeowner be able to afford it? Will they just walk out and start renting somewhere? There’s a lot of things not covered by homeowners insurance that can financially devastate a homeowner, and the mortgagee (bank) might notice an income disruption that a renter would not.

abraxas, (edited ) to memes in The system is broken

And #3 - redundancy so a family member doesn’t end up homeless. I have family that does fairly well for itself. When their first kid turned 18, they bought a rental house in case she needed it someday. When their second kid turned 18, they bought a rental house in case he needed it someday.

So they own two buildings “for the purpose of renting it out”. Building number 2 is now perma-“rented” to kid number 2 because he needed it.

Also, bullet point #1. The NDQ typical long-term return is approximately 11%. Due to recent bubble bursts, it’s down to 10.4%. Importantly, that’s almost exactly 1.3mil in 10 years from 500k. Everything I’ve ever read and learned from investing or investors repeats that rental real-estate is a stable investment, not an aggressive one.

abraxas, to memes in The system is broken

Apartment valuation is calculated on operations not on the market

Apartment valuation in my area spiked until the ROI crossed 10+ years. People stopped buying apartment buildings for a while except as owner-occupied with renters to assist. But in my area, none of those reach anywhere near a net-zero mortgage. The market absolutely still has an effect on valuation in most areas.

But two towns over, people are selling apartment buildings with 2-3 year ROIs, and they’re being swept up by one of a small handful of investors. Building maintenance is terrible, and there’s very little interest in the legal risk of being slumlords except those who are already slumlords over 40-50 buildings or more.

abraxas, to memes in The system is broken

That’s interesting. In my state, rental rates are just plain higher than mortgage rates. Maybe that’s why I’ve never heard of buy to let mortgages.

abraxas, (edited ) to memes in The system is broken

since some people are not in a position to buy land and need to borrow it.

Some people have no desire to buy land, and want to borrow it. More than half the people I know (and I’m in my 40s now) have no desire to hold the liability of needing to sell a property to be able to move halfway across the country or world. They don’t “own” their, so they see having to literally own it as a problem. And they are willing to pay more in rent than a mortgage (which happens regularly in some areas around me).

There are shit landlords, and there are decent landlords. I think half the problem is that while some areas have great protection for poor renters, they often don’t have great holistic renter protections. In my state, for example, government-subsidized rentals have the most apartment quality regulations. But after that, you’re expected to leverage your rent to force action… without actually withholding it in any way somehow. And small business rentals? Even worse. I have a buddy who runs a breakfast joint. The heating system in the building died, so the landlord said “well if you want to stay open in the winter you should fix that”. So he installed a minisplit and the other business in the building had to close for the winter. Ultimately, both businesses started withholding rent (against lawyer’s advice) and he finally caved and called his renters “cheap bastards” as he got heating installed (and it was like a comedy that the heating company walked out on him twice for his after-contract renegotiations).

I’m ok with someone owning and renting out a building. But it should be somewhere near the level of quality the renter would maintain the place if they owned it.

abraxas, to lemmyshitpost in The four houses dads belong to.

My tool experience is limited, but with Makita you seem to be describing the same anachronism principle you find in espresso machines.

Arguably the best espresso machines in a class are reminescent of the same model you found 40+ years ago. If you’re looking for the B+ range, everything worth buying has a big metal E61 grouphead with manual levers. In the S-class range, you tend to have more manual levers as often as bells or whistles. My new machine that cost more than I deserve (wife bought it) is basically an oldschool machine with nothing modern in it but a PID controller. Legend has it, it will be passed down in my family for generations to come (exaggeration, but not much).

abraxas, (edited ) to linux in Linux reaches new high 3.82%

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

abraxas, (edited ) to linux in Linux reaches new high 3.82%

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

abraxas, to linux in Linux reaches new high 3.82%

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

abraxas, (edited ) to memes in 6÷2(1+2)

There has apparently been historical disagreement over whether 6÷2(3) is equivalent to 6÷2x3

As a logician instead of a mathemetician, the answer is “they’re both wrong because they have proven themselves ambiguous”. Of course, my answer would be RPN to be a jerk or just have more parens to be a programmer

abraxas, (edited ) to linuxmemes in Linus does not fuck around

I love how everyone online is psychic.

Actually, I’ve watched two GREAT workers and good people end up losing their jobs because a easily resolved situation turned toxic. The person who felt uncomfortable tried to take care of it 1-on-1 but had too passive aggressive a nature to really be clear when she confronted the guy.

So 6 months or a year later, she was on the verge of quitting and went to HR. He was terminated because it had gone too far. She left soon after because she still wasn’t comfortable at work after the cause of that ended.

…look. I “obviously never dealt” with anything because nobody is allowed differing opinions here, but I have 20+ years experience at businesses where the existence or lack of good HR has been a deciding factor of the work-culture and comfort level of team members. I work 1-on-1 with my company’s Directors of HR on a regular basis to make sure my team is happy and because I am involved with other teams at my job who have their own interpersonal conflicts. One of HR’s responsibilities in a good company is to involve themselves in interpersonal conflicts BEFORE decisive action has to be taken.

The problem is that face-to-face confrontations without a mediator don’t always end well. And I would rather not have HR decide “we have to fire our Rockstar senior dev or this random guy”. But if you address it earlier, HR deals with it earlier (yes, because the paper trail m eans HR can’t just fire “this random guy” later over the Rockstar senior dev). It’s win-win for all parties INCLUDING the Linus Torvalds in this explanation.

But I’ve “obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario” and my experience doesn’t count. So you can ignore everything I said.

abraxas, (edited ) to fuck_cars in same bed length

It does not show that

Agree to disagree.

your link lists MPG of 21.82 for 2023, that is almost 1/3 worse then your friend.

That is for a non-Hybrid Silverado, and my friend has a hybrid. Seems to make sense.

The legal issues are a issue not because these are unsafe or high-emission (they are not). They are a major issue because the auto industry has fed you that tripe and like a lot of US consumers you bought it.

That is sorta tinfoil. There is a process in most states to get ANY vehicle street-legal. But Kei trucks don’t just need safety features retrofitted, apparently they lack a sufficient roll cage to pass inspections for valid safety concerns. Even Kei fans can’t agree on whether it’s more or less safe in a crash than a motorcycle.

As for emissions, in a lot of states you just have to pass standard EPA emissions guidelines like any other vehicle. Apparently that’s very difficult for a Kei truck to do. Perhaps it uses a gallon or two less per hundred miles, but its emissions are worse.

Lots of Kei truck fans out there bitch about how the EPA should have better things to do than care about fehicle emissions, but I’d think a “fuck cars” community would care about vehicle emissions.

These are not good on gas, they have convinced people that 29mpg in a hybrid that costs as much as a house is good.

So your viewpoint is entirely about money. Just be straight with it.

and in no world would you catch me in anything made in north America for the last 20 years. Like many other people I had to buy a very old truck (carberated v8 that gets 14ish mpg btw) and it sits by my barn until it is needed.

Why is that? Newer vehicles tend to be safer in collisions and better on emissions than the equivalent older vehicle.

The “cure” to the f150 is just the option to buy a old f150

Circa 2000 F150s rate as low as 10-11MPG. New F150s rate as high as 25MPG. And new F150s are a lot safer to drive. I’ll ask again, is this entire rant of yours just about money? Because maybe I’m the wrong person to respond to if you’re just cheap. I get it, I’d rather take a bus myself than have a car payment.

abraxas, (edited ) to fuck_cars in same bed length

Thanks for providing some info, sadly the 29mpg on the hybrid is not the norm or good

For a load-bearing vehicle it absolutely is. And I showed that it compared favorably to these minitrucks. This whole thread is about comparing trucks to trucks. If you need to carry shit, you are hurting the environment if you buy a mini-truck over a Silverado or F150.

it looks like your buddy is doing some great mileage compared to say the info from

Well, 10 years goes a long way. You literally picked a 2011 Silverado. Perhaps look at 2023 numbers on the same site?

As for Kei, as I said it’s hard to get a fair chance when the only places nearby sell heavily-used older vehicles. Gas mileage has largely skyrocketed of late because Auto manufacturers are getting scared.

But ultimately, If you have any truck and don’t need its carrying ability, you’re an asshole. I think the case of a japanese mini-truck being the “best choice” is ultimately too rare to hold your breath for.

A step further, the REAL sad truth is that most minitrucks aren’t even legal in the US without being modified to a max speed of 25mph because they don’t meet safety and emission standards for road vehicles. That’s why so many around here are old. Before 1998, they’re grandfathered in and people in other countries that don’t grandfather old vehicles are offloading them.

Do we really want to be cheering on unsafe high-emission vehicles as the “cure” to the F150?

abraxas, to linuxmemes in Linus does not fuck around

The term is “hostile work environment”. HR doesn’t just respond because of strict liability. Just one occurance of something like this can lead to an otherwise solid worker to spiral from discomfort of the situation, both feeling like a prisoner at their job and producing far less value for their employers.

The latter is why HR cares, but the former is why it’s OKay to go straight to HR. If HR is well-trained, things like this shouldn’t escalate just because you went to HR. They should be able to diffuse it productively.

abraxas, to fuck_cars in same bed length

A quick google suggests “real world” use of modern microtrucks is 28ish mpg without heavily modding it or super-efficient variants. Older Kei trucks are lower. Actually, much MUCH lower according to minitrucktalk. 22-23.

I know someone with a 2021 Silverado Hybrid holding at 29mpg. And they regularly lug full loads that would take four trips from a Kei truck. Admittedly the “hybrid” part stops mattering with full loads, but I guarantee Kei isn’t going to have great MPG numbers carrying 1000lbs of cargo.

Minitruck owners (sometimes rightly) lean on a soapbox where they and those around them rarely lug any cargo. IMO, might as well drive a Prius at that point but whatever. But ya gotta stop the circlejerk enough to acknowledge that someone who does regularly carry a full cab worth of stuff is in a better position with a normal truck.

Flip-side, very few people need a truck. And those that don’t need a truck also don’t need a kei truck.

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